Well, apparently we acted, because in the U.S. cancer is now responsible for 1 in 4 deaths. Globally it is 1 in 8. (yes, I know that this primarily has a lot to do with people living to an older age and not dying of other things)
.Unless we act, 1 in 8 will die of Cancer
GIVE TO CONQUER CANCER
AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY
If it began to leak then the ball wasn’t exactly air-tight…
Also, with its tethers attached the capsule looks a lot like one of the tripods from War of the Worlds.
.Ten Miles High in an AIR-TIGHT BALL
A HUGE yellow balloon soared skyward, a few weeks ago, from Augsberg, -Germany. Instead of a basket, it trailed an air-tight black-and-silver aluminum ball. Within Prof. Auguste Piccard, physicist, and Charles Kipfer aimed to explore the air 50,000 feet up.
.Making A Power Loom
This automatic device will weave cloth. Its size may be changed to suit the individual builder.
By JAMES MILLER
WEAVING, as an industry or art, is so old that its origin is unknown. The most ancient example of weaving of which we know is a flax-like cloth found in the ruins of the Swiss lake dwellings, supposedly of the Stone Age.
At first I thought this was a kind of Williams Tube, an early type of computer memory that used a grid of illuminated dots on a cathode ray tube to store data. However, according to the summary of this paper, it is basically what it looks like: a system that uses a camera to take a picture of an oscilloscope. Which made me wonder why they would call it a “memory” when it’s just a camera.
The reason I think, is that it uses the short term persistence of the oscilloscope image as a sort of buffer. When the event you’re interested in happens it will trigger the camera, giving you an image of the activity from before the event.
This is actually pretty handy and reminds me of the modern high-speed digital video cameras used on nature shows. They have to capture very unpredictable phenomenon that happen incredibly fast. By the time the photographer noticed, the event they care about has already happened. The trick to the cameras is that they are continually recording footage, keeping it for a short time in a buffer and then overwriting it. When an event happens that the photographer wants to capture, he presses the button and the camera just stops throwing away the old footage. This means the actual recording starts a few seconds before the button was pressed. This video from David Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth explains it perfectly. (I remembered the clip from watching the “making of” videos when I saw it a few years ago and wanted to link to it with this post. Apparently my google-fu is weak because I just spent the last hour searching before I found the right combination of keywords.)
By the way, if you haven’t seen Life in the Undergrowth, you should get a copy. It is mind-blowing and possibly my favorite nature documentary.
.A Machine with a “Memory”
THIS machine has the faculty for picking up the results of electrical disturbances and registering them in its “mind.” A short time later they are illustrated on an oscilloscope, where photographs are made. The entire operation is automatic.
.Hunting Miniatures
24,000 pieces in world’s largest museum of the smallest articles.
ONE of the most remarkable exhibitions of miniatures, which has been collected painstakingly over a period of sixteen years by Mr. Jules Charbeneau, is on exhibition in St. Louis.
The articles come from thirty countries and the collection consists of 24,000 different items.
Apparently this story was so sensational that the editors had to abandon their headline capitalization style guide. “Screw it, this story is too big, I’m going all in. If I don’t, how will our readers know that it happened On The operating table?”
Surprisingly, operating room fires still happen quite often. The FDA has an initiative to help reduce the number of occurrences.
.Murdered On The Operating Table!
AN anesthetized patient on an operating table — the surgeon approaches with a white – hot instrument—the patient explodes and two operating room attendants are injured!—The clipping from the New York Times tells the story.
Medical history will show that this is not the first time such an accident occurred. That same history should also record that there is no reason why such accidents should happen.
Everyone knows that glamour comes in a plain wrapper. Also, my eyes see “Peach Cupbra” but my brain wants to read “chupacabra”.
.YOUR INSTANT short cut to GLAMOUR
An attractive full Bust Line is a short cut to glamour, poise and self-assurance. If your Bust Line makes you self-conscious, try the new (special up and out) Peach Cupbra. Use it for a week. If you are not delighted, send everything back and your money will be refunded.
Considering that this was published just a few months after Pearl Harbor it seems amazingly mild and reasonable.
.HOW YOU LOOK TO THE JAPS
DO YOU believe that the Japanese launched their attack as a form of national suicide? If so, you’re wrong. They have dared to attack the most powerful nation in the world simply because they believe our national characteristics prove us to be vulnerable.
In 1982 (two years after this article was published) the Cray-XMP was one of, if not the, most powerful computers in the world. It had 16 MB of ram and in a dual processor configuration could hit 400 MFLOPS. It also occupied something like 50 square feet, used an ungodly amount of power and cost around $32,000,000 in today’s dollars.
By comparison, the Apple A6 processor used in the iPhone 5 is built using a 32nm process, so smaller than the lines in that picture. It has 1GB, or 64 times as much memory and the setting aside the dual core CPUs, the graphics cores alone hit about 25 GFLOPS or about 60 times the performance of the Cray. The A6 is about 97 square millimeters in area and costs around $17.50. And of course, it does this all with out Josephson Junctions or a cryostat.
If you want to see what a modern supercomputer looks like, check out the Cray Titan.
.World’s smallest what?
I haven’t checked, but somehow I don’t think the Guinness Book of Records has this one. Scientists at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center claim they have made the world’s smallest experimental circuit elements.
A hemisphere is just geometry, but a semisphere, that’s art.
.Focal Point Art
THOSE who have not developed that esthetic sense of art so necessary to appreciate a “fur-lined cup and saucer” which the surrealists exhibited (and which was illustrated in a previous issue of this publication) will acknowledge that Robert H. Blickenderf has developed something equally striking— yet, when properly viewed, possessing all those elements of art which have been expounded by the great masters.
